Free Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli

an external impression caused by something outside me, like that night in the bar in Harlem, nor a fleeting impression like the time before in the subway, but the stabbing certainty that I was in the presence of something at once beautiful and terrible. I was looking out of the window—nothing except the heavy darkness of the tunnels—when another train approached from behind and for a few moments traveled at the same speed as the one I was on. I saw him sitting in the same position as me, his head resting against the carriage window. And then nothing. His train speeded up and many other bodies, smudged and ghostly, passed before my eyes. When there was once again darkness outside the window, I saw my own blurred image on the glass. But it wasn’t my face; it was my face superimposed on his—as if his reflection had been stamped onto the glass and now I was reflected inside that double trapped on my carriage window.
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    A horizontal novel, told vertically. A novel that has to be told from the outside in order to be read from within.
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    Naturally, there are a lot of deaths in the course of a lifetime. Most people don’t notice. They think you die once and that’s it. But you only have to pay a bit of attention to realize that you go and die every so often. That’s not just a poetic turn of phrase. I’m not saying the soul this and the soul that, but that one day you cross the street and a car knocks you down; another day you fall asleep in the bathtub and never get out; and another, you tumble down the stairs of your building and crack your head open. Most deaths don’t matter: the film goes on running. Except that that’s when everything takes a turn, even though it may be imperceptible, and the consequences are not always apparent straight away.
    I began to die in Manhattan, in the summer of 1928. Of course, no one except me noticed my deaths—people are too busy with their own lives to take note of other people’s little deaths. I noticed because after each death I got a temperature and lost weight.
    I used to weigh myself every morning, to see if I’d died the day before. And though it didn’t happen all that often, I was losing pounds at an alarming rate (I never knew how much it was in kilos). It’s not that I got any thinner. I just lost weight, as if I were hollowing out, while my shell remained intact. Now, for instance, I’m fat and have man boobs, but I scarcely weigh three pounds. I don’t know if that means I’ve got three deaths left, as if I were a cat counting backwards. No, I don’t think so. I think the next one will be the real thing.
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    Dakota and I visited the cemetery near her house in Queens. We went to leave a bunch of flowers for Lucky Luciano, a mafioso to whom she claimed to be distantly related. Luciano had been stabbed in the face in 1929, and was left with a squint in one eye. Dakota described the scene to me with almost literary precision as we were making our way down the long cemetery paths lined with photographs and white lilies. Three men had forced him into a limo at gunpoint and destroyed his face with a knife, but made sure he was still alive. They dumped him on a beach on Long Island. Lucky Luciano walked to the nearest hospital, covering the socket of his injured eye with his hand. The story seemed to me more hilarious than tragic, despite all Dakota’s efforts to move me. After searching for his grave for a while, we came across Robert Mapplethorpe’s. Dakota had an attack of mock nostalgia and wanted to stop for a moment. She requested silence. I’d never liked Mapplethorpe’s photos, but I condescended to sit with her in the sun, one on either side of the gravestone, like two premature effigies of Patti Smith. After a few minutes a white cat appeared from among the bushes and prostrated itself in Dakota’s lap. That seemed to her a sign of something, and perhaps she was right. She wanted to take it home. I tried to dissuade her, because cemetery cats never get